I read about it on the BBC news site and have done 4 days now (they give a word per day). Twice at the 4-th try, once and the third and once at the last, sixth (which was a word I did not know, I just guessed what it could be then looked it up (was "shard")).
So you do not know that "Shard" is the nickname of a London skyscraper? (Or did you learn that from looking it up?)
No, never been there. And I did not know that meaning until you posted :-). What I found was it meant some sort of piece of broken ceramics or something like that. I don't think I had ever encountered the word, if I did I had zero memory of that.
That wordle thing is pretty nice, I liked it. Reminded me of a game we played at school, bulls and cows, but more varied. And it is just one word per day so one cannot be bored too easily nor waste much time with it.
Have never seen that one. But I am not the gamer type at all you know, can't be drawn for too long on a game, it takes some real problem to get me going. IIRC you had designed/programmed some games some time ago? My only game was that "bulls and cows" on a 6800 hex kit, manually assembled on paper while I was learning the trade.
That wordle is globally the same I think, one word per day, people can share phone screenshots of how they did it etc., let me see how long it will keep me (going to bed now with the intention to do today's word).
It was common (inexpensive) when we were kids. It doesn't require any special equipment and, anyone with "decent" reasoning capability can become proficient.
Yup. The advantage is that the games are short. And, once you "learn" how to play (beat) it, they almost become trivial.
Sort of like playing solitaire -- a reasonably mindless distraction... unlike putting together a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle!
Those were "arcade pieces" (things you put money into in order to play) and "gaming devices" ("gaming" being a euphemism for
*gambling* -- slot machines, pai gow poker, etc.) Each has "profit" as a design motivation.Mastermind is conceptually similar. But, an "excuse" for someone to make a few dollars selling you a bunch of colored plastic pieces!
Yeah, archeologists dig up pottery shards. That's where I've mostly seen the word... that and shards of glass in accidents, real or in stories.
Anyone remember a game in the Sunday paper called "Blind Pig"? It was a small crossword puzzle where the clues were like the name. The resulting "word", in this case, would be "PG", PIG with no eyes. It was very creative, but when they author died, the puzzle ended.
Agreed that programming a "game" is much more interesting than playing.
Especially true of zero-person games like Conway's Game of Life. I enjoyed coding that on a rather slow machine. I can still run it but don't know where my source code is.
Similarly true with puzzle (not game) or the "eight queens" problem. I coded that to (try to) eliminate symmetrical answers ("fundamental" solutions) but got (IIRC) 14 patterns instead of 12. Non-fundamental gives 92 patterns! Now we have web and wikipedia I can see other people's algorithms...
I also have one of these "can run but lost the source" :). Not exactly a game, a "knight walk" exercise I did for a friend whose wife had to do it for some exam... I did it in Pascal, I had this integer pascal on my first MDOS09 system, took about half an hour of torture to the floppies and the 1 MHz 09 to compile... My English was not bad at that time but - as it is now - clearly imperfect, upon completion the question was meant to be "Got it. Bored?" (80-s, ha-ha). I had written "Annoyed", thinking it meant "bored", LOL.
A few years ago I wanted to do a sort of a directory display and just looked up the algorithms; works fine and the sources I wrote are intact but for the life of me I can't remember what the algorithm was called and how it worked. I think I do remember how algorithms I have made up work though.
That depends on the nature of the "game".
While I consider myself pretty creative/original in my thinking, I simply don't have the mindset to come up with the *concept* for something like Space Invaders, PacMan, Defender, Joust, Tempest, etc. (Most of these games were conceived of *by* their "programmers")
[My involvement with "games" was confined to designing processors and systems that would "host" the games]OTOH, I found designing gaming (gambling) devices to be very interesting! The rules are typically already in place and it then becomes an exercise in implementation efficiency (e.g., can you make "reels" that move smoothly as if on a mechanical slot machine?), probability theory (the owner of a machine has to be able to *set* the house advantage/take desired from the machine without distorting game play) and regulatory compliance (most games are regulated by agencies in the areas where they are deployed; and, even illegal/grey area games want to be well behaved -- imagine word gets out that there is an "edge" that can be exploited by the player in your game!)
[Pai Gow Poker is especially challenging to implement as you want the game to have an "optimal" strategy so good players can't beat it!]Reverse engineer it? (I did that for a client who "lost" the sources. It's an interesting exercise and gives you insight as to how to frustrate such efforts in *your* designs]
Number of unique games of Tic-Tac-Toe? (not unique *results* but actual "play sequences")
Sources are relatively easy to hold onto -- esp if created after the advent of the PC (before that, "paper" was the most universal medium).
[I even have a BASIC routine I wrote in ~1969 to fit cosines to experimental data... printed on TTY paper (and later covered with packing tape as a poor man's lamination lest it "break" into little pieces!)]My regret is in not saving hardware samples or schematics from the first decade or so of my career. But, back then, it was all C/D/E size vellum and the only practical copying alternative was to make a diazo of the drawing set. Of course, those would be even more fragile than TTY printouts -- in very short order!
Amusingly, saving sources doesn't afford me much as most of the code I wrote was for "deeply embedded" systems -- like the code running on your MCE; hardly of much use without also preserving the hardware to host it!
[OTOH, I *do* have some of the larger prototypes that I designed! There, the cost of shipping a prototype back to a client (when working remotely) is high enough (crating, shipping, etc.) that it is easier for them to just write-off the costs of the hardware. So, you ship schematics, sources and assembly drawings, instead, and let them recreate your design at their end. You then are faced with either disposing of your copy or finding a place to keep/store it -- the latter if it is really interesting!]I designed a medical instrument many years ago. After POST, it would display "Unit Operational".
At the same time, it would play the first few bars from "Shakedown Street" -- the accompanying lyrics being: "Well, well, well... You can never tell!" An insider joke as I imagine most users wouldn't make the connection.
[I love easter eggs!]
That's where comments are most useful! I learned the value of this in one of my earliest software roles.
[Most of my designs are proof of concept or used in "startups". So, I *know* that someone else will have to sort through what I've done with an eye towards commercializing the product. Often, a "programmer" with a very shallow level of education in CS -- or even EE.]I got a call from one such programmer desperately trying to make sense of a string matching algorithm I'd used (Boyer Moore). I told him this, thinking it would trigger some memory in his mind.
Nope. His idea of matching strings was little more than memcmp() (adjusted for NUL terminated vs. "counted" strings, etc).
But, had I left a reference to the algorithm in the comments, it would have saved me having to interact with him at all!
(I only interact with clients -- after delivery -- if there is a demonstrable *bug* in my code. Otherwise, it's *their* product to maintain).
Oh the source is well commented, I can always look into it and see what/how etc. This is valid for everything I have written since say 1985. But without looking I could not remember *a thing* about how it worked. Unlike algorithms I have made up, one notable being the event processing for the MCA DSP part; complex as it is I still remember what it does, for details I'd have to look at the sources of course, it is >10 years since I made it. And the sort was just 4-5 years ago...
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